Novell-SUSE Sponsors Openswan

hsjones writes "Concerned about the demise of FreeS/WAN? Well, looks like Openswan is going to be a good, strong open source IPsec project going forward. Novell and SUSE have jumped in with Astaro to back the project and move it along. See the press release. The Openswan project is at http://www.openswan.org. SUSE Linux and Astaro Security Linux both use FreeS/WAN in their current releases. It will be very interesting to watch what they do now with Openswan!"

Comments

SUSE

[Harrison819]

SUSE is now one of the premier players on the linux scene now, with Novell's help of course. SUSE was my first disro and I am very happy it has found succes. I just hope it does not go the way of redhat and not try to make their distro the best one out there and rely on the name alone, also like metallica but that is for another time.

and ?

[kayen_telva]

What does FreeSWAN do that OpenVPN does not ?
I have never tried SWAN because OpenVPN is so easy.
Are there any compelling reasons to try it ??

Re:and ?

[kayen_telva]

However, with the *SWANs, you can also get x509, nat-t, dpd, foo, and bar.

x509 is certs right ? OpenVPN can do em. nat-t ? OpenVPN doesnt need that kludge. It uses one port that can be redirected through multiple Nats if need be. Dead peer detection ? OpenVPN is self healing. Link goes down, comes back up and OpenVPN reconnects.

Now before I get too carried away, I dont know shit about vpn, but SWAN looks like a bitch (based on my IPCop machine) and OpenVPN is very easy.

Why?

[Turmio]

There has been a working and tested IPSec implementation from Kame Project in the vanilla Linux kernel for some time now. Why go with a competing and conflicting IPSec implementation that was once formed because the official Linus tree lacked the support. Diversity is a richness etc. on but in this case I feel like these efforts seem fruitless. But big companies such as Novell don't do things because they just can so maybe there's something I don't quite get. I'd love to be englightened, though.

Re:Novell's Commitment to Free Software

[Sunspire]

With other major Linux vendors (well, vendor) seemingly moving more and more toward closing their software...

Look, we all know which company you're thinking of, and I'm telling you you're completely misinformed. Can you please let me know some of the supposed closed programs this evil company is distributing, because the last time I checked it was all open source. Somehow the bashers always forget this detail...

This is the comany that is afraid to include mp3 support for being non-free, right? The company that pays Alax Cox, Arjan van de Ven, Dave Jones, Jeff Garzik, Warren Togami, Roland McGrath, Guy Streeter and many more to hack the kernel? In fact, if I'm not mistaken this company has more kernel hackers than IBM and Novell combined (read a kernel changelog lately)? I'd list some GNOME developers that works for this beast of a company, but let's just say outside Ximian they're the #1 employer here as well (cough, Havoc Pennington, Alexandre Oliva *cough*). And all that money and effort they pour into Freedesktop.org and X.org, that's just to lock you in, right?

That company? Am I forgetting something... ? Oh yeah, they pretty much alone funded NPTL development for 2.6, backported it to 2.4 not only for their paying customers but their free version too. I guess they're pretty much the defacto maintainers of GCC and glibc these days too, but other than that, what have they ever given us?